TV advertising is the most popular service for national television broadcasters and their local broadcast affiliates. The sale of program time to commercial advertisers who want to promote their products or services is the main source of revenue. It is obvious that the advertisers intend to target those viewers that are likely to be interested in their products or services. Therefore, some additional demographic or location information is collected by television alliance, re-broadcasters and service providers for a limited geographical area. However, this approach still cannot provide personalized advertisement for each individual inside the same geographic regions. Both content providers and advertisers have an incentive to implement better techniques to target and deliver advertising message to specific viewers. In order to provide personalized advertisement, there are three problems that should be solved: 1) to create user profiles to record the interest and viewing behavior, 2) to identify the advertisement segment and type, herein the advertisement segment means the time period during which the advertisement is present, 3) to trigger the personalized advertisement that is different from the existing advertisement displayed on the TV screen from the broadcaster.
Many existing methods can be used to solve the first problem. The most popular way to obtain a viewer's interests is to track and monitor his daily behavior and/or communications. US2007/0244750 with title “Method and apparatus for selecting advertising” covers a number of the available detecting aspects. U.S. Pat. No. 7,100,183B2 with title “System and method for transmitting and displaying targeted information” uses a completed demographic survey to generate a database named bit mask to control the particular advertising to each viewer.
It is desired to provide personalized advertisement while reducing additional cost to the existing hardware and/or software environment as much as possible.